With the advent of the Internet and Internet-based retailing, a new web-analytics industry has emerged that provides marketing analysis and other types of analyses related to Internet-based retailing and other Internet-based activities. In one type of web-analysis system, particular web pages deployed by an Internet-based client are instrumented so that, when remote users access and interact with the deployed web pages, a web-analysis system receives information from the users' computers that allows the web-analysis system to collect a raw-data set describing user interaction with instrumented deployed web pages. Complex, sophisticated analysis programs within the data-analysis system can then process the raw data to return results to the Internet-based client.
Currently, a large new retailing industry is emerging with the rapid adoption of application-program-based mobile electronics devices, including cell phones, electronic pads, and a wide variety of additional devices ranging from traditional personal computers to portable media players and communications devices. Whereas web analytics is primarily concerned with collecting data from instrument web pages, the new retailing industry includes retailing of application programs as well as retailing through user interfaces provided by application programs in addition to web-browser-based retailing and services. The rapidly evolving new electronics environments provide both opportunities and challenges for web-analytics-like testing and monitoring services for monitoring and analyzing deployed application programs.